Mendocino County Today: Monday, March 21, 2022

High Pressure | Equinox | No Surrender | River Flat | Junior Lifeguards | Tsunami Test | PHF Development | Borage | Small Farm | Highway Fatality | Stress/Medicare | Author Showcase | Beached | Free Lunch | Greenwood School | Water Projects | Oil Field | Gravy Trail | Gloomy Thoughts | Noyo Bridge | License Revoked | Ed Notes | Child Exploitation | Many Proposals | Yesterday's Catch | Lip Prints | Semi Fillup | War Escalation | 1930 Family | DST Dud | Coal Sacks | Plastic Pants | Sunup/Sundown | Grapes Wrath | Protest Fatigue | Doggie Balloons | Succulent Thief | Mendo Shipwreck | Given Up | Old Prez | Ukraine Resistance | Unworthy Victims

HIGH PRESSURE BUILDING IN will warm temperatures this afternoon over yesterday with additional warming on Tuesday. Wednesday through Saturday a gradual cooling trend is expected. There is a chance for rain on Sunday. (NWS)

RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR: WHAT WE KNOW ON DAY 26 OF THE INVASION

Moscow Has Given Mariupol A Deadline To Surrender Amid Alarm That Residents Have Been ‘Kidnapped’ And Sent To Remote Parts Of Russia

by Maanvi Singh & Martin Farrer

Ukraine has rejected a Russian demand for Mariupol to surrender by 5am Moscow time (2am GMT / 10pm ET) on Monday. Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Iryna Vereshchuk said there could be “no talk of any surrenders” and that Russia had been informed of the response.

Russian Col Gen Mikhail Mizintsev had told the defenders of the city to “Lay down your arms”. In a briefing on Sunday, he added that if the people of Mariupol surrendered, humanitarian corridors would then be opened in both the eastern and western directions from 10am Moscow time on Monday.

US president Joe Biden will travel to Poland this week to discuss international efforts to support Ukraine and “impose severe and unprecedented costs on Russia” for its invasion, the White House has said. The discussions will follow Biden’s meetings in Brussels with Nato allies, G7 leaders, and EU leaders.

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said that he believes a failure to negotiate the end of Russia’s invasion will mean “a third world war”. He told CNN that he is “ready for negotiations” with Russian president Vladimir Putin and that “we have to use any format, any chance in order to have a possibility of negotiating”.

Zelenskiy earlier called Putin’s strategy a “final solution” for Ukraine. In an uncompromising address to the Israeli parliament, Ukraine’s president challenged Israel over its failure to impose sanctions on Russia.

At least four people have been killed following shelling of homes and a shopping district in Kyiv, according to Reuters, citing the state emergency service. Video showed firefighters rushing to rescue peopletrapped in the rubble of the Retroville shopping centre in Podilskiy.

Ukraine’s human rights spokesperson, Lyudmyla Denisova, said Russian troops had “kidnapped” residents and taken them to Russia. “Several thousand Mariupol residents have been deported to Russia,” she said on Telegram. After processing at “filtration camps”, some had been transported to the Russian city of Taganrog, about 60 miles (100km) from Mariupol, and from there sent by rail “to various economically depressed cities in Russia”, she said.

Mariupol’s city council said Russia bombed an art school where 400 civilians including children were sheltering. Petro Andrushenko, an adviser to the city’s mayor, said there was no exact number of casualties. “The city continues to be shelled both from the sky and the sea,” Andrushenko said on Telegram.

Ten million people – more than a quarter of the population – have now fled their homes in Ukraine due to Russia’s “devastating” war, the head of the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said on Sunday. And at least 902 civilians have been killed and 1,459 injured in Ukraine as of midnight local time on Saturday, the UN human rights office said. The Ukrainian parliament says 115 Ukrainian children have been killed and at least 140 more have been injured.

China’s ambassador to the US has said his country is not sending weapons to Russia for use in Ukraine. He said China was sending food, sleeping bags and other aid, “not weapons and ammunition to any party”. But pressed on US television on Sunday, he did not definitively rule out the possibility Beijing might do so in the future.

Germany has agreed a contract with Qatar for the supply of liquefied natural gas (LNG) that will help the European country wean itself off its dependency on Russian energy. It could take several years for the deal to come into full effect because Germany has no terminals for selivery of LNG. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia said it was increasing oil production to meet global demand.

David Beckham has handed over control of his Instagram account to a Ukrainian doctor working in Kharkiv. Throughout Sunday, the former footballer’s Instagram Stories were inundated with videos and photographs following Iryna, a child anaesthesiologist, as she worked in the midst of the conflict.

Pope Francis has described what is happening in Ukraine as “inhumane and sacrilegious”. Addressing tens of thousands of people in St Peter’s Square in Rome for his weekly Sunday address and blessing, he called on leaders to stop “this repugnant war”.

Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, has claimed a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine is “close”, despite the scepticism of western governments. But the US ambassador to the United Nations warned on Sunday there was little immediate hope of a negotiated end to the war.

Eleven Ukrainian political parties have been suspended because of their links with Russia, according to Zelenskiy. The country’s national security and defence council took the decision to ban the parties from any political activity. Most of the parties affected were small, but one of them, the Opposition Platform for Life, has 44 seats in the 450-seat Ukrainian parliament.

CALLING ALL MENDO COAST YOUTH! Come tryout for the Junior Lifeguard program on April 9th or May 7th! Junior Lifeguard program is one month long focusing on Aquatic Safety, Teamwork, and Leadership while introducing youth (ages 9-15) to safe marine and aquatic recreational opportunities. The program is designed to provide quality water safety education, develop understanding and respect for the surrounding environment and culture and improve participant’s physical conditioning.

SUPERVISOR MCGOURTY: Facilities and Behavioral Health staff has turned their attention to the development of the Psychiatric Health Facility (PHF) at the County-owned Whitmore Lane site in Ukiah. Planning and design work is under way and initial project schedule is projecting completion in early 2025. 

MARY PAT PALMER: Happy Oestara everyone. Borage is THE early bloom for the bees. Plant borage for bees to pollinate others. 

A SMALL FARM SOUTH OF BOONVILLE

The greenhouse is full of over 750 starts of tomatoes, soon to be followed by an equal or greater number of peppers, then cucumbers, and on and on. Once their roots fill the six pack, they will all need to be “stepped up” before planting out; none will be field planted until after our last frost date in mid-May; and none will start producing until July or later. We must be crazy? Perhaps, but we think we’re also realists: we look directly at the now which morphs into the then. The constant fear of fire, flood, landslide, tornadoes, etc., a country split into thinkers and fantasists or worse, the horror of a world in chaos, and the overarching and ever more immanent collapse of earth’s climate hovers over all of us. We plant because to live requires food (and to live a mentally and physically healthy life requires well raised food), because farming instills in us hope for a future, because it’s the best example we can think of for living in balance, because it is a positive activity in a rather negative world, because it’s a creative act on which to use our money, because it’s physical and hard work with the rewards being food and beauty, because it requires a small community, because we love it! Destruction is easy; creation is always hard. 

We’ve been reading “The Dawn of Everything” in which there is much discussion of agriculture. The authors debunk the prevalent belief that the coming of agriculture was one of the lynch pins in the evolution of society. They must have studied a bit about “farming” since their arguments are in our view, spot on. Why would hunter gatherers give up their easier way of life for the risks of feeding themselves from farming? Weather, bugs, wild animal incursions, physically hard labor, much required pre-planning are only some of the negatives of farming. Wouldn’t any sane person prefer to amble through the woods collecting nuts, berries, and greens, sit by a stream fishing or hunt for a wild pig or rabbit? Population pressure is why farming exists to the extent it does. We are in our 18th year and we’re still fighting all the negatives but we’ve also learned a few things. We let some plants go to seed so they can regenerate themselves which they do anywhere they please. That’s as close to foraging as we can get with farming and still be able to sell the food. Hunters shoot deer and wild pig on the land in season and though we have a freezer full of their meats, we are not allowed to sell it. 

There was a reason small farms (and businesses) were the backbone of our country for generations. They generated small communities of people working together to create a regenerative life. Then corporations took over turning the country to factory farming to provide for the massive population, because “progress” was required to make money for them and their shareholders, and progress is predicated on more folks buying more “stuff”. We buy way more “stuff” than we’d like but most of it is for the farm to improve infrastructure and efficiency. Take care, find joy and don’t buy too much “stuff”, especially no Russian “stuff”! 

Nikki Auschnitt and Steve Krieg

HIGHWAY 1 FATALITY, 26 year old

FINAL EVENT in AV’s “Living Well” series hosted by the AV Community Wellness Coalition & Anderson Valley Health Center:

“Lessening Stress Before It Happens” — A conversation facilitated by Stephanie Gold. Come enjoy our community park and share from your experience or simply listen to others who are also working to reduce stress in their daily lives. It should be a lovely day! Tuesday, March 22 - 11:45am, AV Community Park on Airport Rd, next to Anderson Valley Health Center

---

SPECIAL MEDICARE QUESTIONS & ANSWERS This Thursday at 10 am on Zoom

With a complicated topic like Medicare, you likely have questions. HICAP has the answers as the truly unbiased source for technical help and advocacy. If you want to hear the details from a truly unbiased source, Join us and become more educated about your healthcare.

Register: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAtd-2qrj0iE9OrrtHSLEfBD5QwOhMmkOtZ

GALLERY BOOKSHOP'S AUTHOR SHOWCASE in Conversation with Ginny Rorby

Thursday, March 24, 2022 - 6:00pm to 7:00pm

Inspired by Amelia Earhart's heroic flights, young Winona 'Nona' Williams tenaciously clings to the desire to become a pilot even after her father, with dreams of his own, dismisses the idea. When he quits his job in the Chicago stockyards to join other homesteaders settling the Great Plains, Nona finds herself torn between supporting her father's vision for their future and her mother's struggle to adjust to life on a desolate prairie. Initially, things look up for the family as they settle into life in Dalhart, Texas. The wheat boom is in full swing, and it appears her father's dream of providing his family with a home of their own is coming true. Too soon the effects of the depression impact her family. Then the rains stop. Before long, Dalhart is the epicenter of the Dust Bowl. Like Dust, I Rise transforms poverty into pride and reflects the heroism of endurance.

gallerybookshop.com/event/gallery-bookshops-author-showcase-conversation-ginny-rorby

FREE FOOD PHILO, an initiative of Love to Table, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, is distributing meals in town to those in need. We cook nourishing meals using produce from our farm and others, and would love to offer you a warm lunch on Monday March 21. If you could use a home cooked meal, or have a friend in mind who does, please call or text Arline Bloom (415) 308-3575, who will head up distribution in town.

~ This week’s menu ~

• Lentil Bacon Soup
• Homemade Bread
• Beet Salad
• Chocolate Chip Ghee Cookies 

Thank you for letting us be of service.

For more information on Free Food Philo / Love to Table, check out: unconditionalfreedom.org/love-to-table/

If you’d like to volunteer with us to cook or prepare the meals, please reach out, and you can donate to our efforts here as well: unconditionalfreedom.org/donate/

Our meal this week is made possible with donations from New Agrarian Collective, Big Mesa Farmstead, Sonoma County Meat Co., Central Milling, Sierra Nevada Cheese Company, Ancient Organics Ghee, Community Grains.

BOONVILLE WATER PROJECTS UPDATE

The Drinking Water Project Consulting Engineer Jack Locey reported that the amendment for extra funding came through. He is working with the AV School District and developing the preliminary negotiation points for acquisition of the well and related water treatment components at the Elementary School and also for the well site at the NE corner of the High School Campus. Also, his surveying team set up for the new layout at the Meadow Estates well field to accommodate the wishes of the Meadow Estate Water Board.

Clean Water (Waste) Project Consulting Engineer Dave Coleman reported that the amendment for extra funding came through. He is making plans to do the soils investigations at the Valley Views site and explained the issue about using soil samples to determine the depth of the water table as it doesn’t look as if we will have enough rain to observe it through rainfall. We are setting up an on-site meeting with the parcel owner to get permission for the tests and to discuss the project. 

CSD Board Chair Valerie Hanelt explained the steps in the water projects process. Both the projects are working on finishing acquiring the components. After that is settled, the engineers can develop rate studies for the CSD to consider. Once the CSD has approved what the rates will be, the CSD can appeal to LAFCO (Local Agency Formation Commission) to be approved to be a water district. We can also begin our public outreach as we will know the answer to the question most people ask, “How much will the rates be?” Kim Bennett-Strong will be more involved during this process.

Chair Hanelt also explained that we will be reaching out to Meadow Estates parcel owners to see if there is any interest in being part of the Wastewater project. 

THE GREAT REDWOOD GRAVY TRAIL — behind the press releases…

by Mark Scaramella

In a press release dutifully circulated by the Northcoast's tame media last year, State Senator Mike McGuire, the primary proponent of the never to be built “Great Redwood Trail,” wrote: “The Budget Act that was passed in 2021 included two significant groundbreaking items related to the Great Redwood Trail. No. 1, it appropriated the last bit of funding needed to pay off the remaining debt from the North Coast Railroad Authority…”

In his presser McGuire curiously omitted the amount of the “remaining debt” but elsewhere it was reported to be about $4 million owed to Doug Bosco’s Northwest Pacific Railroad Company.

“And it also added $10.5 million to pay for stepping up the master planning process of the Great Redwood Trail.”

Nowhere does it say how they arrived at that large number, nor who specifically gets the $10.5 million, or what exactly it will be spent on.

IN RECENT MONTHS, McGuire and his state Democratic Party hacks, er, colleagues, screamed wolf for several months in opposition to a clearly bogus phantom bogeyman they called “The Coal Train,” which they said wanted to convert the North Coast Railroad into a train that would ship raw coal from somewhere (not specified) up the North Coast along the Eel River and to the somnolent port of Eureka where it would be shipped to China. The logistics of such an endeavor are mind-boggling, even if they figured out a way to re-track the Eel River. If the demon train was allowed to proceed, said McGuire et al, it would wreck environmenal havoc on theNorthcoast and had to be stopped!

INSTANTLY, government bodies and non-profits up and down the Northcoast issued overwrought statements and passed panicked resolutions denouncing the phantom coal train and its proposer(s) — even though it was clear to everyone that such a train would never run for a host of obvious reasons.

So why the big uproar against something that would never happen? 

According to a December 21 article in the Eureka Times Standard by reporter Isabella Vanderheiden:

“In August [of 2021], the newly formed North Coast Railroad Company, LLC filed a complaint with the Surface Transportation Board in opposition to the North Coast Railroad Authority’s request to railbank the dilapidated rail line in an attempt to export coal overseas from Montana, Utah and Wyoming through the Port of Humboldt Bay,” reported Ms. Vanderheiden. 

Then quoting McGuire:

“We know that this shadowy corporation is worth over a billion dollars and they have put in a competing application with a Great Redwood Trail to federal regulators to start a toxic coal train that will run through our communities,” Senator Mike McGuire said. “Their application to start a toxic coal train will be up at approximately the same time when federal regulators review our bid to be able to rail bank the rail line from Willits all the way up to Humboldt Bay and turn the rail line into a trail. Here’s what I say to them: We are not going to let that happen.”

So the threat from the “shadow corporation” is a problem because it might present an obstruction to or delay of the flow of millions of dollars McGuire wants to hand over to Bosco and McGuire’s insider Trail advocates, not because there was ever any chance that the coal train would run.

GLOOMY THOUGHTS 

by Mike Geniella

Okay. Up front I will tell I am on a rant. By day’s end where there was a lot of gray but no substantial rain. Hopes for a good soaking were dashed.

My cynical side surfaces when my hopes for the best get dashed. I get cranky.

As an old-school newspaperman, I obsessed about any given subject. I research the hell out of it, and then laboriously sort through the puzzles of information to reach my own conclusions. Yeah, my thoughts are usually no better than anyone else’s, but I work hard to base them on solid information.

Today, my thoughts are across the board.

I swear out loud at the television when I hear Republican Bozos like Tucker Carlson defend all things Russian including Trump’s dealings with Putin, a former KGB agent has been described as a ‘cold lizard.’ 

I damn near weep when I see the daily examples of the bravery and courage of the Ukrainian people in the face of the Russian terrorism that is being unleashed on their country and their culture.

I never served in the military. What do I know about on the ground horrors of war? Or for that matter the grinding violence and substance abuse that local law enforcement deals with every day? Nothing. What I do understand is the good people of Ukraine are battling a beast. I cringe at the thought of the harsh realities that greets them every single hour of the day.

So please excuse me while I rant about a few local matters:

I hope the hell some of the flag-waving ‘Mendocino Patriots’ on Saturday ran out of gas during their so-called ‘Freedom Convoy’ up to Willits and back. Make them pay Mendocino village prices to fill their rigs back up, after wasting gasoline that working people, farmers, and others in need of affordable fuel could have used.

And then there seems to be a brouhaha over a Willits High School student, and a post online of something that was perceived by authorities to be a possible threat of violence. A defense attorney claimed to represent the 15-year-old who was taken into custody after an investigation and placed in Juvenile Hall for 2.5 days. She claimed the District Attorney’s Office had cleared the teen, which led to his return home. Prosecutors are not going to talk about details of any case involving juveniles, as state law requires. So, who knows what if any determination was made? 

It seems there is a rush among some to blame Willits school people for their role in the teen’s arrest. Astonishing. School administrators every day in this country are faced with the possibility of gun violence on their campuses. Dozens of students, teachers and other innocents have been slaughtered on site. School personnel should be sensitive to any possibility, and students, parents and the public should support them in those efforts.

Lastly, Matt LaFever’s piece about this guy amused me for a moment. Then I started thinking about Editor Bruce Anderson’s observation that in Mendocino County we get to create a new persona every day.

In Matt’s online MendoFever report:

“In the strange happenstance way Mendocino County seems to attract the unexpected, yesterday, a Game of Thrones villain was ordered to pay restitution for faulty contracting work he did almost four years ago. In 2018, 59-year-old Dan Hildebrand (AKA Kraznys mo Nakloz, a rich slave-trader) was charged with a series of misdemeanors associated with unlicensed contracting work he conducted on two Willits homes. Fans of HBO's Game of Thrones will recognize Hildebrand for his role as Kraznys mo Nakloz who became wealthy from training and trading the Unsullied, a race of warrior-eunuchs that would later become loyal to Daenerys Targaryen, the Dragon Queen.”

Hope Hildebrand is pulling in the Hollywood royalties. He was ordered to pay nearly $75,000 for “faulty work he and his hand-picked associates attempted to undertake in 2018 for two Willits area homeowners,” according to a post by the Mendocino County District Attorney’s Office.

NORTH COAST PSYCHIATRIST LOSES MEDICAL LICENSE for Allegedly Drugging Female Patients, Sexually Assaulting Them and Raping One Woman

Earlier this month, North Coast psychiatrist Cuyler Burns Goodwin had his medical license revoked for allegedly sexually victimizing three patients, two while drugged — one allegedly raped moments before he escorted her to her caring husband who waited in the front lobby.

mendofever.com/2022/03/21/north-coast-psychiatrist-loses-medical-license-for-allegedly-drugging-female-patients-sexually-assaulting-them-and-raping-one-woman/

ED NOTES

DARN STORM ANYWAY. Soon as we're not looking the thing disappears. “The storm is underperforming in the North Bay,” meteorologist David King said Saturday afternoon. “It didn’t even materialize in the higher elevations, which is where we expected it.” (Press Democrat)

INTERESTING STORY in Sunday's PD about the Cardinal Newman's girl's basketball team being declared a “competitive anomaly,” meaning they whomp the competition so bad they're about to be downsized: “If approved, the Cardinals’ league schedule would be reduced from 10 to five games, but they would get the automatic playoff bid from the Oak division.”

THE CATHOLIC SCHOOLS should be in their own Bay Area league, especially in football. Marin Catholic, for instance, competes with public high schools in a Marin County league they have dominated for years, not getting any real competition until the playoffs where, invariably, they play another Catholic powerhouse like Santa Rosa's Cardinal Newman. 

IN THE EAST BAY, there's De La Salle, an even more powerful prep powerhouse than Cardinal Newman and Marin Catholic. These schools claim they don't recruit, which is true, the recruits come to them. Say you're a Philo 8th grader who benches 400 pounds, runs a 10 flat hundred meters with ambitions to play in college and maybe even the NFL. You need pro-level coaching to get there, sooooooooo next thing you know you're in Sister Concepcion's English class at Cardinal Newman learning how to say your Hail Marys.

ANY DISTANT EVENT involving the U.S., here come the lefties with long-winded demonstrations of their vast historical knowledge, all pegged to the assumption the U.S. is fundamentally responsible. In the case of the shocking, indefensible invasion of Ukraine by Russia's lead kleptocrat, it's of course Biden's fault. Farther back, it's NATO's fault, NATO being an American construct as if the NATO countries haven't always been enthusiastic members. Farther back than NATO, Ukraine was a natural part of Russia, nevermind that an overwhelming majority of Ukranians always preferred to have their own country.

ALL this history is trotted out by the recliner left to prove what? That the Ukranians deserve the destruction of their country by a megalomaniac in $400 sneakers and a $15,000 jacket? The above talking points, incidentally, are identical to those that Putin is putting out.

SEEMS AWFULLY COLD to me, and suspiciously selective given that the left (negligible itself in this country since about 1970) was largely silent when the Russians razed Grozny and then Aleppo. The destruction of the Ukraine is indefensible. I'm mystified why there's even an argument about it.

PROPOSALS AND MORE PROPOSALS

by Jim Shields

At this week’s Board of Supervisors meeting (March 15), a series of recommendations were discussed concerning the ongoing drought and related activities involving property owners selling water to water haulers from existing wells or drilling new wells for commercial water sales. The objective is to create some workable rules and regulations to oversee and exercise more control over water at both the start and end uses. One of the problems are illegal weed grows that rely on delivered water from either illegal or unlicensed sources.

I worked with other people involved in County water issues, including water districts, ranchers, farmers, law enforcement, environmental health, and water haulers. We met with Supervisors John Haschak and Glenn McGourty who head up the BOS Drought Committee. Altogether we met four times (via Zoom) starting in late September, and were able to come up with a set of recommendations that are reasonable, and just as important, workable. It’s an example of how sometimes committees actually get something productive done.

No action was taken by the Supes on the proposed package of rules and regs, as Supervisor Ted Williams wanted more information on the role water haulers play in the delivery process.

As the district manager of a local government water utility whose operations include selling water to water haulers, I’ll be providing the BOS with any and all information they might night need on the subject.

The issue will return for action at an upcoming meeting in the near future.

Here are the proposed recommendations that our group made to the BOS:

Water Hauling:

• For all commercial water haulers, require a permit, a business license, and tracking logs.

• Consider updating Chapter 9.24, applicable to potable water hauling, to require tracking logs, and consider feasibility of incorporating non-potable water hauling into the Chapter.

• Ban commercial water hauling from 11:00pm to 5:00am unless specifically exempted by the Board or specifically authorized by the Sheriff’s Office and/or fire agencies for a specific use or emergency.

• Ban commercial water hauling to any destination at which the end user will be using the water for non-permitted commercial activities.

Water Extraction:

• A major use permit is currently required for water extraction pursuant to MCC Chapters 20.036, and 20.012; in the short term, utilize existing law to require use permits for water extraction and amend the code to provide clarification of this existing requirement.

• Develop standard conditions and guidelines respecting use permits for water extraction with the input and assistance of the Planning Commission, and update the code accordingly.

• Consider developing a regulatory permitting program for groundwater extractors who are removing water from their parcel, or contiguously owned parcel, with renewable and adjustable permits based on changing water availability; require tracking logs, metering, extraction limits, and a hydrological study on any new extraction permit.

Lead Agency and Enforcement:

• Delegate the new Water Agency as the lead agency for administering water related programs, such as permitting and monitoring of water extraction and water hauling.

• Enforcement will need collaboration and coordination between Environmental Health, the new Water Agency, Code Enforcement, and the Sheriff’s Office. A point person dedicated to this effort is needed especially during summer and fall months.

• Consider substantial penalties to deter unregulated use, hauling or extraction of ground water, such as $1,000.00 (first violation), $2,000.00 (second), $3,000.00 (third), and $5,000.00 (subsequent violations).

Legislation targets sky-high CA gas prices

As gas prices continue to skyrocket, a California state Senator along with a citizen’s advocacy group I’ve long supported, Consumer Watchdog, announced this week proposed legislation that mandates oil refiners to disclose how much they make on every gallon sold.

State Sen. Ben Allen joined has introduced a bill that will require oil refiners to disclose once a month the price they pay for crude oil and the profit margins they make on the gasoline they refine and sell. SB 1322, the California Oil Refinery Cost Disclosure Act, will allow Californians to finally know how much the big five oil refiners in the state are profiting from each gallon of gasoline they sell.

Allen says Californians pay an average of $1.09 more per gallon than most other Americans.

“We ask the oil companies on behalf of California drivers: Let’s end the games of smoke and mirrors. Open your books and show the public your true costs of doing business,” said Allen, who chairs the California Legislature’s Environmental Caucus and the Senate Environmental Quality Committee.

A 2019 report by the state energy commission found that the primary cause of California’s high gas prices is simply that the state’s retail gasoline outlets are charging more than those in other states. The report concluded that “the primary cause of the residual price increase is simply that California’s retail gasoline outlets are charging higher prices than those in other states… The overall California increase in retail margins, above that experienced by the rest of the U.S. has resulted in California gasoline consumers paying an estimated additional $1.5 billion in 2018 and $11.6 billion over the last five years.”

“There continues to be a big black hole when it comes to data with relation to the oil and gas industry and how they price gas at the pump for regular Californians, and I think of course the industry prefers that it stays that way,” Allen explained.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has also called for an investigation into the state’s retail gasoline outlets. No results have been announced.

The proposed law also requires every California oil refiner to report monthly (for each of its California refineries that manufactures gasoline) its Gross Refining Margin per barrel, the difference between the price of crude it buys and the cost of finished gasoline it sells, and its Net Refining Margin (the “crack spread” or Gross Refining Margin minus its operational and fixed costs). The reports would be posted on the California Energy Commission website.

Question on Ukraine relief contributions: A reader sent me the following inquiry:

Jim, I have Two Questions: Are there any suggestions as to how to be safe when contributing to relief for Ukraine? Is there any secure local drive to help? How to avoid the online scammers who seem to invade so many sites? All things point to just finding a genuine phone number for a well established organization that is involved in relief and send them a check rather than a credit card number or worse a debit card number. But how do you know if what you give is sent along with minimum administrative off bleed? Doctors without borders? UNICEF? Save the Children? What to do? Please do advise. Yours, and be thoughtful. TC

My response to TC: The very best and most reliable way to check charities, relief programs is Charity Navigator, “A Guide To Intelligent Giving.” I’ve been using their website for years and always recommend it as the place to go for you to know how to safely and securely make donations. On their website, they list and rate a large number of relief programs helping Ukraine. Here’s the url: https://www.charitynavigator.org/

(Jim Shields is the Mendocino County Observer’s editor and publisher, observer@pacific.net, the long-time district manager of the Laytonville County Water District, and is also chairman of the Laytonville Area Municipal Advisory Council. Listen to his radio program “This and That” every Saturday at 12 noon on KPFN 105.1 FM or www.kpfn.org.)

CATCH OF THE DAY, March 20, 2022

MARCO ALARCON, Ukiah. Unlawful sexual intercourse with minor less than 16 years of age.

JOEL COWAN, Ukiah. DUI, failure to appear.

CAMILLE DENIS, Hidden Valley Lake/Ukiah. Marijuana cultivation, cultivation of more than six plants.

MATTHEW FEIGEL, Hidden Valley Lake/Ukiah. Marijuana cultivation, cultivation of more than six plants.

JORGE LUNA, Redwood Valley. Domestic battery.

TONY MCELROY, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, proation revocation.

CHRISTIAN PEDERSEN, Willits. DUI, suspended license, probation revocation.

ROBERT SPICER, Willits. Assault with deadly weapon not a gun, criminal threats, brandishing (non-gun), resisting.

GUSTAVO TEPALE, Ukiah. Domestic abuse, false imprisonment, cruelty to child with possible injury. 

HERIBERTO VILLA, Ukiah. DUI.

A GOOD YEAR FOR THE ROSES

I can hardly bear the sight of lipstick
On the cigarettes there in the ashtray
Lyin' cold the way you left them
At least your lips caressed them 
While you packed

And a lip print on a half filled cup of coffee
That you poured and didn't drink
But at least you thought you wanted it
That's so much more than I can say for me

But what a good year for the roses
Many blooms still linger there
The lawn could stand another mowin'
It's funny, I don't even care
And when you turned and walked away
And as the door behind you closes 
The only thing I know to say
It's been a good year for the roses 

After three full years of marriage
It's the first time that you  
Haven't made the bed
I guess the reason we're not talkin'
There's so little left to say
We haven't said
While a million thoughts
Go runnin' through my mind
I find I haven't spoke a word
And from the bedroom those familiar sounds of our one baby's cryin'
Goes unheard

But what a good year for the roses
Many blooms still linger there
The lawn could stand another mowin'
It's funny, I don't even care
And when you turned and walked away
And as the door behind you closes 
The only thing I know to say
It's been a good year for the roses

— Jerry Chesnut

US MILITARY AID TO UKRAINE GUARANTEES MORE SUFFERING AND DEATH

by Stephen Kinzer

Ukraine has suffered two terrible afflictions in recent weeks. First came the horrific Russian invasion, which has set off bloody conflict and outraged much of the world. Second is the American decision to send that suffering country massive amounts of advanced weaponry, which guarantees more suffering and death.

Never has the United States rushed so quickly to provide so much high-tech armament to a distant country already enveloped in war. Rather than sending diplomats in an urgent effort to reach an armistice and stop the bloodshed, the United States is fueling an already raging conflagration.

This week President Biden announced that he would send Ukraine a staggering $800 million worth of “our most cutting-edge systems.” His largesse includes 800 Stinger missiles, which are hand-held projectiles that can bring down a military jet or a civilian airliner, and 9,000 “anti-armor” systems, which can blow up tanks or trucks. They will not only be used to kill Russians, but also provoke Russia to respond by killing more Ukrainians. Given the number of mercenaries that both sides are recruiting from around the world, some of these weapons will almost certainly leak onto the global black market. Look for them to turn up in the arsenals of terrorists around the world.

Those of us who have seen war up close know that it is the worst thing in the world. It destroys innocent lives and shatters families and communities forever, long after political and military conflicts end. Yet for nearly everyone in Washington and for huge numbers of Americans, war is distant and antiseptic, something like a geopolitical video game with added fireworks. It isn’t. It’s about bodies blown apart and entire nations laid waste. The only winners are gleeful arms makers, for whom this war is a bonanza of bloodstained profit.

Our obsession with Ukraine is unlike anything in living memory. People who had never heard of that country a month ago, and who even today could not find it on a map, have almost overnight come to believe that the future of human freedom is being decided there. They boycott Russian vodka and display the colors of the Ukrainian flag, which most had never seen before. This tsunami of delirium will be rich fodder for future psychologists studying mass hypnosis, group frenzies, and the power of the media to whip populations into self-destructive fury. Less laughable is the Niagara of armament that is flooding into Ukraine. If Russian President Vladimir Putin needed any more evidence for his conviction that the West wants to use Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia, we are providing it.

Nearly everyone in Washington has succumbed to our new national hysteria. One exception is Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who warned that escalating this war “does not help Ukraine, does not help the people of the United States, and does not make the world any safer.” An even more trenchant dissent came from the other end of the political spectrum. “What is the one thing that brings Republicans and Democrats together?” Senator Rand Paul asked. “War! They love it. The more the better.”

It’s bad enough that the United States and NATO have joined Putin in a mad escalation, recklessly fueling war and making no serious effort to reach peace. Even worse is that the peace formula is clear for all to see. It’s mind-numbingly simple: a non-aligned Ukraine without foreign troops or weapons. Call it the Henry Kissinger Plan, since 10 years ago he wrote that “if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either side’s outpost against the other — it should function as a bridge between them.” By today’s standards, that makes Kissinger a “Kremlin stooge” who is “parroting Putin’s talking points.”

Our escalation in Ukraine will fuel counter-escalation. That intensifies a confrontation between two nuclear-armed powers. Every Russian weapon sent to Ukraine means horror. So does every American weapon. Our testosterone-fueled war fever invites disaster for Ukraine, Russia, Europe, and the world. A peaceful solution is within easy reach. We should grab it.

bostonglobe.com/2022/03/17/opinion/us-military-aid-ukraine-guarantees-more-suffering-death/

THE U.S. TRIED PERMANENT DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME in the 1970s — then quickly rejected it

by Susan Davis

The Senate gave itself a pat on the back earlier this week when senators voted without objection to make daylight saving time permanent.

"The good news is if we can get this passed, we don't have to keep doing this stupidity anymore," said Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., of his legislation to end the need to annually change the clocks in March and November.

However, America tried this before — and the country hated it. In the early 1970s, America was facing an energy crisis so the government tried an experiment. Congress passed a law to make daylight saving time permanent year round, but just for two years. The thinking was more sunlight in the evening would reduce the nation's energy consumption.

It didn't work, said David Prerau, one of the nation's foremost experts on the issue.

"It became very unpopular very quickly," he told NPR.

Americans do not like changing their clocks, but they disliked even more going to work and school in the dark for months — the price the nation had to pay for more sunlight in winter evenings.

It also didn't reduce energy consumption as intended. In 1974, Congress repealed the law — before the two-year experiment was even up. Nearly 50 years later, Congress is back at it.

"Today the Senate has finally delivered on something Americans all over the country want: to never have to change their clocks again," enthused Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., on the Senate floor.

"We know that daylight saving time helps to turn the corners of people's mouth upwards, into a smile!" said Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass.

Advocates for permanent daylight saving time include Steve Calandrillo, a professor at the University of Washington law school. He testified before a recent House subcommittee that it would do everything from save lives to reduce crime, conserve energy, improve health and boost the economy. His motto: "Darkness kills, sunshine saves."

Dr. Beth Malow, a neurologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, also testified. She agreed that it would be healthier for Americans to stop changing their clocks, but she thinks permanent standard time is a better choice.

"It's called standard time because ST lines up with our natural, biological rhythms," she said. Permanent standard time with sunnier mornings and darker evenings would be healthier, especially for front-line workers and school students with early waking hours.

The best answer, according to Prerau, is to do nothing at all. The current system that begin in 2007 of starting daylight saving time in March and ending it in November, is the product of decades of study and compromise.

"I personally think the current system that we have, with some flaws, is the best system we could have," he said.

The House has no immediate plans to take up the Senate-passed bill, but there is bipartisan support for it. The Biden administration hasn't taken a position on it yet. "I don't have a specific position from the administration at this point in time," White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters.

The history lesson here for Congress: Be careful what you vote for.

(npr.org)

MITCH CLOGG: Winter left here bright and early this morning. HAPPY SPRING! Birds, breeze, the swish of cloth on bed and back...

The sounds of the world, with my hearing aids, are not the sounds of the world. They are vibrations mediated by Starkey (the maker) and thrust into my ear canals like ships in the Suez. What I hear (if hearing it is) is transformed by Starkey. Plastic clothing, for example, swishes rather loudly in my brain, somewhat like corduroy pants, despite the absence of stereocilia in my tectorial membrane.

As far as I know, plastic clothes started the year I was born, in 1938, after a Frankfurter named Paul Schlack, working with a substance created in Delaware by DuPont, produced Nylon 66 and made toothbrush bristles from it. It really took off, though, at the New York World’s Fair in the wonderful interbellum (until September) year of 1939, with nylon stockings. The importation of silk had grown complicated, what with all corners of the globe relapsing warwards, so American ladies bought 64 million pairs of “hose” in 1940, the first year they were offered. (That would be just about every adult female in the U.S. in 1940.)

Now, I doubt I have any clothes that are completely plastic free.

I’m glad China has quit taking American garbage to make stuff with. Everything about that trade seemed as tawdry as a Pacific garbage gyre, and China, with fewer burdensome restraints than America, sent it back as clothing and an infinity of other things with Made-in-China labels. I have all-plastic pants from there that are fiendishly warm and comfortable, stretchy and peculiar as they are. I limit my wearing time, imagining some unwholesome outgassing around my legs and lower torso. Plastic is never really finished changing. Seductive, my plastic Chinese pants, on a cold morning.

But my Starkeys, my wondrous ugly Starkeys, come not from China, I am enormously proud to say, but Eden Prairie, Minnesota. They live, when not on my person, in a keen little lidded box that, on casual glance, is like the presentation box for your intended’s engagement ring. How embarrassing it would be for the nervous swain, while taking a knee, to offer the wrong box to his beloved. The potential for that bond could likely be better assessed from such an error than from the entrails of chickens, the testimony of fortune tellers or the prognostications of Tarot cards.

A READER WRITES: Thing is, most farmers back then worked sunup to sundown regardless of what the clock said. And I think most rural schools rolled with the same rhythm as well. And at harvest time the older kids who were essential to the farm would just skip school altogether if need be. The other story I’ve heard is that DST’s goal is to create more usable leisure time in the evenings, the better to encourage TV viewership and thus increase advertising revenues. Regardless, it damn sure encourages people to stay up later. Most of the people I know think I’m loony because I follow the sunup to sundown rule, myself. I’ve fallen into it gradually as I got older, but now I wouldn’t have it any other way. I think the body naturally prefers it that way.

SPEAKING OF JOHN STEINBECK'S The Grapes of Wrath novel, here is the broadside in 1940 for the adaptation into an iconic movie:

"March 15, 1940 - The motion picture The Grapes of Wrath opened nationwide. The film adaptation of the controversial John Steinbeck novel dealing with the harsh treatment of the displaced families of the Dust Bowl was directed by John Ford and starred Henry Fonda. Fonda plays the fictitious Tom Joad, who fights injustice as his family heads west on Route 66 seeking a better life in California."

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER PROTEST

by Tommy Wayne Kramer

I think there’s some protesting over on the coast or near the coast, maybe about logging. Or drilling, or a bridge, or the name of a town over there. 

You say there are no angry mobs at the moment? Wait a day.

There’s always some gaggle of malcontents gathering here or there or both, and you must forgive me if I don’t have the details right. I can never remember exactly where the angry idealists are currently shaking their fists, or why they’re shouting their shouts. Who can keep it straight?

It’s always the same enraged but righteous swarms yelling from the same script: “Hey hey, no no, gabba gabba and we want it NOW!” about the sacred trees and the watershed thing. I know, I know, you can’t keep it all straight either.

We’ve got protest fatigue. We’ve had the same drama on the same stage with the same people shouting the same lines for 50 years. Forgive us if we don’t remember whether your protest is located at Jackson State Forest or the Lost Coast or the Yolla Bolly wilderness.

Or all three. Plus another two or ten in Humboldt County.

I can’t remember a time in Northern California when there wasn’t an anti-logging protest somewhere nearby, and each time every protester promised us squirrels would die, streams would collapse, skies would grow dark and the world would end if another tree went down.

At this point Northern California logging protesters have no credibility. They are the Chicken Littles of our world, always squawking, always running around panicked, sweaty, in a feverish state. Always screaming the same things, always hoisting the same signs. Forever blaming and scolding everyone else, forever self-righteous, always so smug.

We’ve tuned them out. Their complaints are bogus because whenever lumber crews return to the scene the deer survive, the streams flow, trees grow back and grow tall, plus a secret bonus: houses get built, loggers get paid, families have food and economies thrive. 

But the protesters never notice. They’re already off in Yolla Bollyland shrieking about a picnic table installation near sensitive nesting habitats of endangered Contrails. Shhh! Listen. Hear their bugles?

From the way faux idealists weep when trees shed their leaves, which they do annually, you’d think trees were rare, precious and impossible to replace. But in Mendocino County there are more trees than there are people, squirrels, deer, houses, cars and weeds put together. 

Don’t believe me? Take a three-minute flight out of, and back to, the Ukiah airport. Spend 10 seconds looking at aerial photographs of the county. Or count them yourself.

My favorite tree grievances over the years:

1) There was a tree at Ukiah’s Grace Hudson Park that was diseased or whatever. Had to come down.

The usual gray haired old crones gathered to squawk and croak, but had little success until they announced plans to sing protest songs while topless. I don’t remember if the tree got offed or not, but traffic along South Main Street quickly evaporated as drivers, fearing an encounter, detoured six blocks out of their way.

2) Four redwoods along Hospital Drive at Perkins Street were to be removed to build a Walgreen’s store. Came the usual screams and roars and then a threat: If the trees were cut and the store was built none of the protesters would ever shop in it! Ever! And they’d tell their friends, too!

(How long did they laugh at the next Walgreen’s board meeting in New York?)

3) Whatever Judi Bari used to yell about.

4) Years of rage from Morons Against the Willits Bypass, a group opposed to building two lanes of raised pavement around the eastern edge of Willits, because it would result in (fill in the blank) _____________ to trees.

Once in a while an inspired eco warrior weaves new threads into tired narratives and announces a threatened area is suddenly a sacred burial ground for indigenous peoples, or essential to rare invisible butterflies, snail target darts, freckled owls, rodentus typhoidus, migrating abalone, coastal flamingos, arctic mosquitos or flightless pterodactyls. 

These eco-props hold a warm place in the walnut hearts of environmentalists only until the latest protest plays out, then are forgotten along with inland viewsheds, dairy spawning grounds or desert wetlands. So we ignore them and forget them.

Why pay attention to people who have less credibility than robo callers, but aren’t as polite? 

‘CRIME AGAINST NATURE’: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE WORLD’S MOST NOTORIOUS SUCCULENT THIEF

Byungsu Kim pleaded guilty to attempting to ferry more than 3,700 wild dudleya plants from California parks to South Korea

by Lois Beckett

When Byungsu Kim appeared for his sentencing hearing on Zoom from the Santa Ana jail in California, his jaw was wired shut.

The 46-year-old South Korean national had been in prison for more than two years on two different continents. According to the US government, he was an “international succulent trafficker”, perhaps the most notorious houseplant poacher in the world.

Kim had already pleaded guilty to taking more than 3,700 wild dudleya plants from California state parks and attempting to export them to South Korea.

“All these things happened because of my lack of knowledge,” Kim now told the judge through a translator, according to Courthouse News, speaking with difficulty through his injured jaw, the result of an assault by another inmate. “If I had known a little bit more about America, if I had known a little bit more about the laws in America, I would not have done this stupid wrongdoing.”

The American prosecutors argued that Kim’s claims of ignorance were ludicrous. He had already fled prosecution once, escaping on foot from the US into Mexico in 2019. He had later been arrested in South Africa for illegally harvesting more than 2,000 rare succulents, including some more than a hundred years old. And while prosecutors could not prove that Kim had stolen succulents on his more than 50 previous trips to the US, they suspected, based on export records, that he might have taken upwards of 120,000 wild plants since 2013.

Kim’s crimes, the prosecutors argued, were motivated not by ignorance, but by “insatiable greed”.

Farmer to fugitive

Law enforcement officials have little information about how Kim, a South Korean farmer who studied agriculture in college, ended up on the run from US agents. The details in court documents are sparse: he is separated from his wife and has two daughters, ages six and 16.

Kim’s American attorney, Jeremy Lessem, wrote in court documents that his client had hoped to use the plants he had taken from other countries to grow succulents on his own farm. Kim had grown up poor, Lessem wrote, and saw rare plants as a way to earn extra money “that he could use to pay for the education of his two girls”.

“Harvesting plants on public land in South Korea was often ignored or met with monetary fines,” Lessem wrote.

What is clear is that when Kim flew into LAX from Mexico in October 2018, he and his two assistants, Youngin Back and Bong Jun Kim, were fully on the radar of California’s environmental cops.

Game wardens of the state’s fish and wildlife department observed Kim renting a minivan and filling it with empty backpacks, plastic bins and boxes. The three men later began a two-day drive up the California coast, according to court records.

Wardens surveilled the trio for more than a week as they stealthily navigated around state parks on California’s remote northern coast, filling their backpacks with dudleya, an attractive local succulent.

The men dropped off their haul at the Secret Garden Nursery in Vista, California, then returned north for two days to dig up more succulents in Mendocino, this time communicating with handheld radios.

The wardens waited while Kim, who used the alias “Neo”, obtained documents to have the southern California nursery legally export 259 pounds of dudleya. He claimed that all the plants had originated in San Diego.

They waited when the men transported dozens of plant boxes to an export facility in Compton.

Then, as Kim and his companions prepared to drive away, the wardens made the arrests. The boxes Kim had tried to export contained more than 600 pounds of succulents, or 3,715 individual plants, more than double what the export documents described.

A perfect victim

California game wardens started going after plant thieves in 2018 after succulent thefts exploded in both California and the Western Cape of South Africa – regions with similar Mediterranean-style climates, which made them succulent poaching hotspots.

The public response was “overwhelmingly positive”, said Captain Patrick Foy, a spokesman for California’s fish and wildlife department. The reaction to poaching enforcement is sometimes negative, but when it came to succulents, “people were furious”, Foy said.

It probably helped that the plants being taken were popular, with widespread name recognition. Dudleya farinosa, the type of dudleya most sought after by California poachers, is particularly “charismatic” to humans, experts say. They boast the precise mix of qualities that Americans demand from crime victims: they are pretty and small, very fragile and yet curiously resilient. Their common name, “liveforevers”, is said to have been given to them by 19th-century European naturalists, who were shocked to find samples of the plant still alive after months-long ocean voyages. Dudleya do not thrive in domestic captivity. “Treat them like a petunia, and they’ll be dead,” said Stephen McCabe, a California succulent expert.

The wardens found allies in California environmentalists, who passed along tips, identified poached plants and served as expert witnesses. While some dudleya are quite common, many species grow in only a few places, and some were already threatened by two of California’s most persistent dangers: wildfire and luxury development, said McCabe.

Plant advocates warned that some species of dudleya were so rare that, if they were targeted by poachers, they might go extinct, causing broader damage to entire ecosystems.

“It’s not hard to imagine a hillside denuded of dudleya that then sloughs off into the ocean because it doesn’t have any plants to hold it there,” said Nick Jensen, the conservation project manager at the California Native Plant Society.

‘A major smuggler’

Kim and his assistants were charged with conspiracy and with violating a California law against destruction or removal of plant material on public land. Wardens estimated the stolen dudleya were worth $600,000 on the South Korean market.

The California state charges were only the beginning. The US attorney’s environmental crimes unit wanted to make an example out of the case. “In our view, a major smuggler who needed to be stopped,” said Matthew O’Brien, the assistant US attorney who prosecuted the federal case.

In May 2019, when Kim learned about the federal charges, he fled. His passport had been confiscated, but Kim had gone to the South Korean embassy in Los Angeles, said he had lost his passport and been issued a new one. He crossed the border with Mexico on foot, and flew from there to China, then back to South Korea.

Five months later, Kim re-emerged, this time on the other end of the globe. South African investigators caught him illegally harvesting more than 2,000 rare conophytum succulents, including one more than 250 years old and dozens more than a century old.

Shortly after taking on the case, prosecutor Anne Heeramun received a call from an American fish and wildlife officer working as an embassy attache: her new suspect was already a fugitive from justice in the US.

The South African prosecutors highlighted the “severity” and “brutality” of Kim’s “crime against nature”, and how stealing “large, ancient ‘mother’ plants” put the entire species at risk, especially during times of serious drought.

“The collection of these plants is an ecological tragedy,” they wrote.

The real demand for smuggled plants

Kim pleaded guilty to the charges in South Africa and paid a large fine. After a year in South African prison, he was extradited to the US in October 2020.

His case, like similar ones before it, drew significant media attention. Coverage of succulent smuggling often focused on the market demand for succulents in Asia, with experts pointing to the growing middle classes in South Korea and China, and the popularity of succulents as status-markers for hipsters and housewives.

Wild plants had particular cachet in Asia, California game wardens suggested: “It’s like having a Fendi bag on Rodeo Drive,” one warden told a student journalist. “A dudleya farinosa from the wild bluffs of Mendocino, California, especially a five-headed one, is apparently a super cool thing to have.”

Over the years, that narrative has been challenged. Early discussions about plant poaching had been full of “stereotypes and tropes” about an “Asian super-consumer”, motivated by vague “east Asian cultural traditional practices”, said Jared Margulies, a political ecologist at the University of Alabama.

But when Margulies investigated the market in Seoul, he found no dudleya for sale at the stores where “hipsters and housewives” shopped for plants.

There was also a botanical red flag: dudleya were finicky houseplants, likely to die quickly – an odd choice for the mass consumer.

In fact, Margulies found, the reason dudleya were smuggled to South Korea was not because of local demand, but because of its high-end greenhouses, where rough wild dudleya could be pampered for a few years, growing larger and more lush, before being sold for elite prices on the global market.

Many of the plants trafficked to South Korea probably ended up being resold elsewhere, Margulies concluded, to collectors in South Korea, China, Europe and the US.

The case in Crescent City

Margulies’ research would have a major impact on Kim. As an expert witness in Kim’s case, he reduced the government’s estimate of the market value of Kim’s wild succulent haul – from more than $600,000 to somewhere between $100,000 and $255,000. Federal sentencing guidelines closely track the value of stolen goods.

US prosecutors asked that Kim be sentenced to three years in prison as a deterrent to other smugglers.

Lessem, Kim’s attorney, argued that he had suffered enough. He had contracted Covid-19 in prison, Lessem said, and lived in fear of contracting it again. His assault by another inmate, which left him with his jaw wired shut, was part of the toll of being imprisoned in a country where he did not speak the language.

Expressing some agreement with Lessem’s arguments, the judge sentenced Kim to two years, at the lower end of the guideline.

The Bureau of Prisons further credited Kim’s prison time in South Africa towards his sentence, a justice department spokesperson said. But that did not mean that Kim was released.

Instead, his federal time served, Kim was transported in late January to the custody of the Del Norte county sheriff, in Crescent City, a remote northern California town of about 6,000 people.

Kim is now facing two additional cases in state court, one for his original succulent thefts, and one for fleeing the country during that prosecution, according to his new attorney, Joseph Futrell, who said neither he nor his client would comment.

In California, dudleya smuggling has dramatically reduced in recent years, but South Africa has seen a new surge in “floral matters”, Heeramun said. This time, it’s locals facing prison time. Foreigners are still driving the succulent trade, she said, but they have responded to prosecution by “using locals to do the gathering and the picking”.

One way to prevent the poaching of rare plants is simply to cultivate as many of the coveted plants as possible, thus reducing the market value of stolen plants. But environmental activists also continue to endorse tough criminal punishments. In 2021, the California Native Plant Society helped pass a state law specifically criminalizing dudleya poaching, with fines of up to $500,000 and six months in prison.

“It’s very sad if people are compelled to come to California, or anywhere, and remove a wild organism from its natural habitat, and they end up in jail,” Jensen said. “It’s just a sad story all the way around that I’m concerned, for the plant and the people.”

(theguardian.com)

YOU CAN'T HARRY YERSELF OUTTA THIS, CRAIG

Leaving for Godhead at My Earliest Convenience

Meanwhile, in Ukiah: Finally got out of the bed early afternoon, and walked up to Plowshares for the week end bag lunch. Delicious cheese sandwiches, chips and cookies, a tangerine, and water. Walked back to Building Bridges homeless shelter and laid back down on the bed at 4 p.m. with nothing to do until tomorrow. Have given up entirely! Chanting the Hare Krishna Mahamantram constantly, no devotional service to do, and eagerly looking forward to leaving this world and going back to Godhead.

Craig Louis Stehr

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY: Biden is flying to Brussels on Thursday. Making these transatlantic flights can’t be easy for a guy pushing 80, but at least you can say Biden is game. It reminds one of Stalin summoning a moribund and sick President Roosevelt half way around the world to Tehran in Nov. 1943. That trip pretty much did Roosevelt in, and at the time Roosevelt was 15 years younger than Biden is now. My hope is that a befuddled Biden doesn’t do something stupid enough that it will trigger WWIII. I see historical comparisons being made in the MSM: Putin is Hitler, Z is Churchill, Biden … a modern day Talleyrand.

WORTHY AND UNWORTHY VICTIMS

by Chris Hedges

Rulers divide the world into worthy and unworthy victims, those we are allowed to pity, such as Ukrainians enduring the hell of modern warfare, and those whose suffering is minimized, dismissed, or ignored. The terror we and our allies carry out against Iraqi, Palestinian, Syrian, Libyan, Somali and Yemeni civilians is part of the regrettable cost of war. We, echoing the empty promises from Moscow, claim we do not target civilians. Rulers always paint their militaries as humane, there to serve and protect. Collateral damage happens, but it is regrettable.…

scheerpost.com/2022/03/07/chris-hedges-worthy-and-unworthy-victims/